The Colonial Enlightenment and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8940368
AutoresJoseph La Hausse De Lalouvière (0000-0003-4715-072X, autor de correspondencia)
Año2025
Volumen48
Número1
Páginas1-35
Fecha de publicación2025-02-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaFrench Historical Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0016-1071 • E-ISSN: 1527-5493
EditorialDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00161071-11503616
OpenAlexW4407960729
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas59

The fall of the Compagnie des Indes after the Seven Years’ War prompted a crown takeover of the Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean. The new royal administration in Ile de France (modern Mauritius) turned to natural and economic science to increase the island's productivity and improve the condition of enslaved people. However, a network of colonists and ex-Company men, represented by the Mauritian-born landholder Joseph-François Charpentier de Cossigny, embedded themselves in the apparatus of enlightened reforms. In the absence of an established plantation system on the island, they exploited the persistence of Company-style patrimonialism to obtain public subsidies for their investments in slavery. Cossigny framed the horticultural, commercial, ethnographic, and scientific research he conducted as public service. His critics denounced it as rent seeking. Lobbying for Mascarene slaveholders in Paris during the Revolution convinced Cossigny that the Enlightenment could be more than an extension of economic claims making; it could be mobilized to reinvent Atlantic slavery in the Indian Ocean. An Enlightenment born of colonialism on the periphery of the plantation complex thus flowed into an emerging antiabolitionist movement

Ancient history · Archaeology · Colonial rule · Colonialism · Enlightenment · Theology · African history and culture studies · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Philosophy